SATA on IDE

[johnnywyoming]

Building a new system. Running Windows XP. Is there a big difference in running a SATA drive on IDE emulation instead of finding and loading a driver to run it as SATA?

 

[Hawkeye22]

There isn't a big difference. On XP I recommend IDE unless you're running a RAID setup. Vista & Win7 have built in drivers for AHCI so it's less problematic on those OS's.

 

[sminlal]

With XP it's less hassle to use IDE emulation mode since the AHCI (SATA) drivers aren't included - you'd have to use the "F6 to load drivers" procedure during the XP install and have the AHCI driver disk handy. That's not necessary if the motherboard emulates IDE.

With Vista/Windows 7 AHCI is supported out of the box, so there's absolutely no reason to use IDE emulation mode.

 

[johnnywyoming]

If I use the AHCI driver, which I have on floppy already, it gives me a choice between X86 driver and if I remember correctly X64 driver... Doesn't this choice depend on the version of XP I'm running... or does it depend on the processor?

 

[Hawkeye22]

It depends on the OS. Use x86 for XP (32 bit) and x64 for XP 64 bit.

 

[johnnywyoming]

Great... Thanks

 

[johnnywyoming]

Best answer selected by johnnywyoming.